On the 19th of October reports came up that the FBI raided US homes of Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska on charges like money laundering and blackmail. Earlier claims of the Treasury Department emphasized that he threatened the lives of business rivals, ordered the murder of a businessman, took part in extortion, racketeering and illegal wiretapping and belongs to a Russian organized crime group. But Deripaska who defined his role once as acting unseparable from the Russian state took part in a multilevel Russian influence operation around the 2016 US presidential election. His business partner Paul Manafort who owed him several million Dollar was for several months Donald Trump’s campaign manager. When Manafort lobbyed for the Putin friendly Ukrainian government prior to 2014, he was joined by former Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer. I did a lot of research on Deripaskas network in Austria and the covert Russian strategy unfolding with it; another word for it would be „multilevel Russian influence operation“.
In 2007 Deripaska visited Vienna with Vladimir Putin to acquire shares of construction company Strabag; he demanded a seat in Strabag’s advisory board for Siegfried Wolf who was the CEO of Magna where Deripaska also became partner. The then chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer in 2010 was elected chairman of the advisory board, which Wolf left in 2015. The shares which Deripaska bought were from Raiffeisen who still is partner in Strabag; the deputy chairman of the advisory board is Erwin Hameseder from Raiffeisen. The screenshot below shows a photo of Deripaska the Denver Gazette first used in front of the GAZ factory which was once owned by the Russian state when Magna in 1998 began to cooperate with it. Now Siegfried Wolf is Deripaskas business partner and has bought the MAN factory in Steyr in Upper Austria. Gusenbauer took part in Manafort’s Ukraine Lobbying and in Austria he and Wolf pushed Rene Benko of Signa Holding who bought the Chrysler Building and was represented by Skadden, another Ukraine Lobbying Partner.
